Re: "git branch" issue in 2.16.1

Jeff King [off-list ref] writes:

Keep in mind that we always run the pager, since we don't know ahead of
time how much output will be generated. It's just that with certain
configurations of "less", it may exit if it sees EOF before there's a
whole screen worth of data.

This is controlled by the "-F" option. By default, Git will set LESS=FRX
in the environment if you do not already have a $LESS environment. So
some other possibilities are:

  1. You have $LESS in your environment (without "F") on one platform
     but not the other.

  2. Git was built with a different PAGER_ENV Makefile variable on one
     platform versus the other (that's what controls the baked-in LESS
     defaults).

  3. "less" somehow behaves differently on macOS. The "F" behavior is
     quite old, but possibly there's some platform-specific bug.

4. Between your two runs, you do not have that many branches to fill
   the screen vertically in either case, but only in one case you
   have a branch with very long name (or perhaps "branch -l -v" made
   a line longer), and you have S and F in LESS environment.  The
   case that shows branches with short names will cause pager to
   exit at the end, while the other one, because it wants to allow
   you to scroll sideways, will not.